Two Toshiba ARM tablets & Lenovo smartbook 1.5GHz resurrection tipped

Smartbook rumors a-plenty this morning, as Toshiba and Lenovo's plans for the rest of 2010 seep out of Taipei. According to DigiTimes' sources, while Toshiba has already shown its first smartbook - which it insists on calling a MID - the Tegra 250 based AC100, the company is also apparently preparing two ARM-based tablet PCs for launch by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Lenovo's mysterious plans for their own smartbooks have been linked with faster Qualcomm Snapdragon processors.

News spread earlier in the year that Lenovo had axed their IdeaPad U1 Hybrid and Skylight smartbooks, claiming the two systems were only intended for conceptual purposes. More recently, it was suggested that in fact the two machines were delayed not cancelled, with a switch to Android being the rumored reason for the postponed release.

Now, the Taipei sources reckon Lenovo are using the opportunity to boost performance by throwing out Qualcomm's 1GHz Snapdragon chipset and replacing it with the company's newer dual-core 1.5GHz chips, such as the MSM8260, MSM8660 or QSD8672. These would offer boosted performance over the original versions and possibly give Lenovo an edge over the 1GHz Apple iPad. However, the new Snapdragons won't be available until later in 2010, delaying the new IdeaPad U1 Hybrid and Skylight models until close to the end of this year.